


don't look down, don't look back

by ohmeohmy (heffawoozles)



Category: The Last of Us (Video Games)
Genre: Enemies to Lovers, Eventual Sex, F/F, Mental Health Issues, Minor Original Character(s), Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Search for a Cure, Sharing Body Heat, Spoilers, Survival Horror, Swearing, Sweet/Hot, Uneasy Allies, Unromantic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-30
Updated: 2020-09-30
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:21:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26735029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heffawoozles/pseuds/ohmeohmy
Summary: Separated from the Fireflies while escorting a team of scientists, there's only one way that Abby will survive the Infected-overrun Midwestern wilds. And it comes in the form of the last person on Earth that she ever wanted to see again.
Relationships: Abby & Ellie (The Last of Us), Abby/Ellie (The Last of Us)
Comments: 14
Kudos: 76





	don't look down, don't look back

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Abby's worst nightmare lurks in a Burger King, and hell. She barely even knows what a burger is.

There's no feeling in the world quite like the feeling of being hunted like a fucking animal.

Abby's biased at the moment though, and she knows it. She doesn't think there's any feeling quite like sprinting headlong through the woods at night either, with half a dozen runners twitching and squealing and flailing not an arm's length behind her, their buddies' blood thick and still steaming on her hands and face.

It's easy to say there's no other feeling in the world like anything - when Abby can't remember what it's like to feel anything else at all. 

God, she's been running scared for days. And now she's a dead bug walking.

"Dead things don't walk," Lev had laughed once, warm and golden under the Catalina Island sun. "Why kill the demons if they could just get up again?"

"Figure of speech, kiddo," Abby had said, smiling. She's seen Lev snap a dozen people since Haven, but when he thinks about killing, he still only thinks of the Infected. "Dead's still better than alive and thinking, isn't it?"

"I wouldn't bother. I'd make a house in the trees and just live up there all the time."

"You'd be living on your own. Up high, I'm just a dead wolf walking. Wouldn't mind you tossing me down all the fruit you'd find up there, though."

Lev had cocked his head. "You still think of yourself as a wolf, then?"

And Abby's stomach had sunk straight down to her toes at that, so she'd blurted, "Bug."

"Huh? Where?"

"One big one. Right here." Abby had jabbed her own thumb in her chest and Lev had let out a peal of laughter so loud he'd scared himself into clapping a hand over his own mouth. "What? A Firefly's a bug, isn't it? Dead bug walking!"

Grasping fingertips scrape at the back of her shirt. Once. Twice. Still she feels nothing, only her limbs as deadweights already aching to rest underground. She stumbles, and jagged fingernails -

Lev grinning, his dark eyes bright with a joy so rare and so vibrant it tears her open just from looking.

\- _tear_ into her _shoulder_ -

It's enough. Cold and numb and exhausted, she screams until her throat is raw. She reaches behind her, grabs arm and head and hair that rips out easily in her hand, she flips the thing over her shoulder with it screeching and thrashing and clawing until it hits the forest floor and she yanks _up_ and the skull pops free from the spine in the crook of her arm.

She's laughing wildly, a low hollow sound that's just wasting her breath, and she hisses, "Got you, you son of a bitch," right before the rest of them plow into her from behind.

Got you, you son of a bitch.

* * *

Contrary to popular belief, Nebraska is not a _flat_ place. It's fuckin' hills all the way, all four ways, north and south and east and west.

Abby is on one of them. And this, she realizes numbly on the way down its tree-dotted slope, is what it feels like to be one in a formless tangle of hand-drawn cartoon characters in a fight, like her dad had used to let her watch in Salt Lake.

"Think they'll ever start making more?" she'd asked him once, huddled against him while the projector light flickers on the concrete wall and Ed, Double-dee, and Eddy prank the cul-de-sac out of what's gotta be its entire mint of quarters.

A world that runs on money isn't a world that's got Infected lurking in every basement in America. Abby ignores the ache in her chest.

Dad yawns, a side effect of being off his feet for more than ten seconds in a row. "More of what, Abby-bear?"

"More - you know." She has to fish for the word while the weird guy with the dentist thing around his head pretends to rise from the dead and her thoughts derail completely. "Um. Animation. Cartoon shows and stuff. Movies."

Dad chuckles tiredly. "I'm a medical guy, not an audio-visual guy. Wrong kind of geek."

"They figured out how to do it all once," she insists. "Cameras and recording stuff and everything. They can figure out how to make it all again. Can't they?"

In Abby's head, there had always been a They. "They" built everything, from outhouses to ranch houses to skyscrapers. "They" made vaccines. "They" built computers, figured out how to put the spark of life in them. "They" were still around - just getting older by the day. Gotta take advantage of what They knew before it was too late.

But Dad had been "They," probably the world's most important They ever, and he had died, and what They was around to fix the smoking crater that _that_ had left in the world? What They would there be to fix the world, once all the scientists and all the diplomats were dead?

So Abby had sniffed and hunted and clawed her way to Jackson. So Abby had hiked to the middle of fuckin' nowhere Nebraska.

So Abby is going to die here, and she is never going to see Lev and his bad new self-inflicted haircut again, and she is gonna just have to hope there's still enough They to go around.

The Infected slam into her one, two, three - and they're a kicking, screaming, foaming, rotting mass of limbs and disintegrating flesh, tumbling ass over teakettle earth then sky then earth then sky then hanging broken jaw and mushroomy hands missing three fingers each and oh god oh god oh god, she had not signed _up_ for this shit.

"Goddammit!" Bam - into a rock. "Can't you guys just -" Bam - ricocheting off a tree. " - watch your _fucking_ step -" Wham - the tangle gains air, and when they land they all burst apart. " - at _least_?"

One more roll and Abby smacks into a wall with the entire flat of her back, a solid _thunk_ that drives all the air out of her lungs and bounces her skull off concrete so bright lights burst across her vision and it's night and the runners are screaming and rolling and banging into everything around her like she's digging their hearts out with a spoon, so it's all senseless light and darkness and deafening noise and her wheezing and she needs to vomit, she needs to - 

See Lev again. 

Powerful, grasping hands seize her by the ankles and _drag_.

"Fuck no! Fuck you!" She thrashes like a rabbit caught in a trap and she thinks her skull might split open. but who cares, who _cares_ , she was never the sharpest tool in the shed anyway -

A writhing, twisting body throws itself on top of her.

Hands seize her by the head.

And that makes her reach up and take a half-rotten throat in both hands and she's strangling an Infected upside down while its teeth snap an inch from her face.

There's two more sets of teeth though, and Abby can't kick and wiggle in the mud forever.

"No! No! God no! No no no no no no -"

_Crunch_. Bone and blood and brain matter sprays. And heavy, ugly pain flares stunningly fast through both her hands and Abby drops her arms with a strangled cry that whisks away the last of her breath while the runner's body bumps lifelessly against the top of her skull.

A thud, an unearthly screech, and the one on top of her rolls off. Bones snap like twin gunshots, and the hands let her legs go. 

A hand fists in her hair and hauls her - with wiry and relentless strength - gasping and clawing and tears-running-down-her-face to her feet.

"No, let me go! Let me -"

Drags her right back up against the concrete wall, except a windowsill digs into her breasts and a second hand seizes her by the arm and she's getting dragged head and shoulders and blinding, grinding, scraping pain in through the window, hitting a hard floor in a muddy grassy bloody heap.

In the darkness, dusty and faded floors. Counters. Handrails. A warped sign that says _Burger King - Have It Your Way._

Weak and weary to the point of collapse, Abby lets herself get pulled through a small and dark and musty space, shoved into something not much bigger than a broom closet, joined by someone. The doors swing shut behind them and something metal slides into the handles with delicious finality, thank god and the devil and whoever, whatever the fuck is out there.

* * *

They don't speak. They just wheeze and cough into the quiet while the Infected keep on squealing weakly outside, while a gentle rain starts to patter on the roof. On an unspoken signal, they both slide down the wall to the floor.

After a long moment, Abby starts to gingerly take stock. Head. Face. Neck. Arms. Stomach. Back. Legs. Everything she can reach, she gently touches, but she already knows. She knows she wasn't bitten.

Sliced up though. Banged and bruised. Hands still smarting and aching where her freaking savior's foot had connected with a runner's head and caught Abby too. 

"Thanks," Abby gasps into the total darkness. She wants to cry, still wants to throw up, but something tells her she's gonna need the body fluid so she wrestles the impulses down with a savage will. "Oh my god. Thank you. I can't believe - I can't believe I'm all right, I just -" She laughs a little because what the hell, she's not dead. "I think you ripped a bald spot in my head, but I'm pretty sure I can make it work. And my hands. Who cares, you could've sliced 'em off, but I would still owe you. You saved me. I haven't seen a fucking soul in _days_ , and here you are!"

The person in the closet with her doesn't say a word. Doesn't even breathe.

Abby can sense where the person is though. In a world where living people are in short supply, she half believes she can detect heartbeats across a room, heartbeats free of mushroomy fists forcing them to keep on pumping. Abby turns her face toward the other life next to her and squints, curious.

There's a window, way narrow and high up and out of reach and thickly clouded with years of grime. But even with the rain, a little bit of light must be fighting its way through, because a long moment of staring lets Abby see the faintest of gray outlines. Lots of shelves on the walls. Long objects, squat things, brooms and maybe buckets. Thick boxes, lids askew. A big heavy one under a thick square tube labeled _ICE_.

Not a closet. A freezer.

She picks out the person's head and shoulders beside her.

Dimunitive frame, shorter than Abby. Skinny.

The person shifts - and puts face in hands.

"Fuck _me_."

A girl voice, but deep, naturally hoarse. The girl starts laughing. And then she can't seem to stop, wrenching giggles so tired they might as well have been a death rattle.

Abby knows that voice. From across a dozen different waking and sleeping nightmares, Abby knows that voice.

"Oh god, oh wait," Ellie chokes into her hands. "Please don't actually fuck me. I didn't mean it. Size difference is totally a thing." She starts gasping into her gutwrenching laughs. Hyperventilating.

"It's you," Abby rasps, gone cold from the crown of her head to the tips of her toes. Like she has been here frozen for all these months, preserved perfectly in ice. Like the time between a beach and a boat and salt water flaying her sunburnt skin and _now_ was actually no time at all.

It's you.

It's you, and why isn't one of us dead yet?

Ellie is rocking back and forth, gently. "Abby. Abby. Abby, what the _hell_ are you doing here."

"Shut up. Just shut _up_."

And Abby is pulling herself to her feet just by the friction between her sweating palms and the smooth wall because no, this isn't happening, she isn't gonna do this, Ellie's voice is getting louder and if she says Abby's name one more fucking time she thinks they both might start ripping their own skins off their bones, and Abby stumbles hard into the metal bar slid through the door handles and she starts to pull with fury and a sob in her throat. Thinking nothing but _get away_.

Then the air fills with the screeches of Infected. Fresh, unmaimed Infected, coming closer and closer from out of the woods. From outside, fists and heads and whole bodies start pounding on the solid walls.

And Ellie's hollow laughter rings through the freezer, like the last hysterical gasps of a ghost that can't do anything but keep coming back to life.


End file.
